


Footsteps

by Phoenixflame88



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Genre: Cyrodiil, Dark Brotherhood - Freeform, Gen, Seeing things one should not, Thieves Guild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 22:36:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/971099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenixflame88/pseuds/Phoenixflame88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A false move and a curious nature have led to a hunt like no other for a young thief, after he crosses paths with the Dark Brotherhood. A fortnight later and the nightmare is at an end. Almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Beginning

Footsteps. Soft leather. No creaks from metal or rawhide seams.  _An important one then_. All the normal ones wore that second-skin armor. His heart burned through his chest, sucking in his breath and choking on it. The one from that night? No idea.

The wall leeched the warmth from his back and the dew-drenched grass sucked at his toes. Two houses formed the other walls of the garden, a little slice of nature to amuse the rich, or provide cover for trysts too passionate for a bedroom.  _Three feet from the sewer grate_ —two heartbeats to roll to it, another few to wrench it open.  _Too many heartbeats._  An arrow would not take that long to bury itself in his skull. No, he heard no wood.  _Still too many moments._  A thrown knife would find his guts before that.

Even then, goblins and vampires roamed the sewers. A vampire or  _them_? Vampires could bargain. No, that was a lie. But they stood further from the Void.

A soft whisper against stone. Cloth rustling against knees. A cat's pounce behind him. _Cat._  Poor, poor Cat.

* * *

"The Roxey Inn, eh? Such a rotten soul gets a trip to the Roxey Inn!" She sprawled on her back, green eyes smirking up at him.

"Aye. Two hundred septims too."

"I might have to take some."

He grinned. "You could earn it."

"Giving me an easy job? Charity!"

She twisted to her shoulder and hooked her arm around his neck. It dragged him closer, just as her mouth splattered him in a wet kiss.

"Yech, infected!" He jerked back, bracing his arms behind him, resting on his knees in the soft grass.

"Neh, bewitched!"

She had washed this morning. Her bracken hair shined a bit, tangled in the torque she always wore.  _A witch's prized heirloom_ , she always drawled. No, a few horsehairs worth of stained metal with a bit of yellow added by a bored mage. The pearl medallion was the inside of an oyster's shell.

Cat the Sorceress. He titled her as a mockery. Rather, Cat the thief who turned her tricks with limpid charm spells, making any drunkard suddenly see a woman with far more breast and glow than the street-made girl. Cat, whose fingers fumbled and betrayed her at locks, could slip into a purse and lift its contents all without breaking gaze with the fool whose mind swayed with drink.

She had tried her tricks on him once. And he had chased her down into the mud when he was missing four coins.

" _Practice, for bettering your magical defenses."_

" _I just saved you from getting kicked out of the Thieves' Guild," he said, as he fished out his coins from her bodice, between her scrawny breasts. Women always hid things there, though she was hardly a woman._

" _My thanks then, Arieh," she beguiled. She leaned up to kiss him full on the mouth._

_Never had he flown from a girl so fast._

The sun was slinking down in the skies. For a moment, her torque looked gold. They were almost thieves again.

* * *

Arieh trembled, a cornered rabbit, teeth sawing into his lip, the cheeks of his mouth already oozing shreds of flesh. Cold at his back, his feet, his legs. Another whisper. The warble of a night bird. A flutter of wings. Or a cloak? The yammering of his heart drowned out the night.

Two weeks of drowning. A promising start that died. Among others.

He heard a sigh.  _A sigh?_   _The thing requires breath?_  The stone scraped under leather— _away!_  To the left, in a rustle of steps and stalking.

He made no move except for quaking all over. He hated it, hated it with everything in him. Himself too, for being such a stupid whelp.

More steps! Louder too, just a trace. With his thief's ears, he could see the assassin slinking through the night, a glint from a blade enfolded in black. Eyes only for the abyss.

He knew such eyes.


	2. Curiosity

Asleep. Wine-bellied. Old and snoring—doubly sure. He looked down at the sleeping Imperial, feeling no camaraderie for his own race. At least none where his purse was concerned. Or lectern, in this case.

The box was on the nightstand beside the bed. _No lock, senile old fool._ No magical defenses either. He always checked. All thieves knew about the Chest of Ages. Sucked and smashed into a chest and trapped until the end of Nirn—he always checked.

Beside the bed was a glass shortsword. _Thank the gods for the wine._ Lukas Ralus had won a few brawls in his fresher years.

He tried to settle his shaking hands. His first task outside the city, a test of merit. Sneaking into the man's room in the inn was easy. Why did his breath thrash against his throat?

A thump came from below, and he could have jumped to the ceiling. Just a drunkard.

Sliding a thumb under the wooden lid, he opened the lectern. The necklace needed no light to throw off flashes of blue. A family heirloom, stolen years ago. Funny the client only remembered its loss now. _But no questions._

Another clunk and he almost dropped it. Thank the gods he always twisted stolen jewelry around his fingers. No, thank Methredhel for teaching it. It slid into his leather reticule.

Ralus remained asleep, too full of wine to hear. _Damn drunkards were fucking lucky._

But at a third thump he was less a thief and more a curious boy. He had found the mark. Two hundred septims were a clink away. With bare soles and a step that would make a cat proud, he crept from the room. The hallway was short. There were only two rooms. Passing the first door, he slipped down the stairs, just a young man eager for a late night drink. The fire already warmed his hands. Before anything else he spotted the innwoman's counter. Without a crabby innwoman. A closer look almost undid him.

There, slumped against the counter, skirts spread and chin to chest. _Murder!_ He flattened himself against the stairway wall. A scrape of wood on wood. His neck hooked around the corner. And his heart stopped.

Two creatures, swathed in black, crowded around the Dunmer trapped in a chair. The mer's throat was bent back, over the back of a chair braced on its rear legs. Steel nuzzled against his jugular, a second from giving a bloody smile. One figure, armored and panther-like, held him down with the knife. The second wore a robe.

 _"You were foolish…"_ A hood and crackling fire muffled the speaker's voice. A rasping quality kept Arieh from discerning the gender. _"…Sithis cares not…"_

_Sithis? Damndamndamn!_

_"You betray the Void? The Void does not have to take its own vengeance."_

Spit gurgled in the Dunmer's throat. One arm dangled, kinked and broken. The other was curled in a fist, and the ring on one finger caught the firelight. _Indignant or scared beyond shitless? Latter._ As was he. He stepped back and up one step, shadow-quiet. But Sithis knew all shadows. Sithis and his avenging acolytes. Another step. The cloaked head snapped up.

The moment screeched in his ears like a sword over fiddle strings. Wood zinged towards him, just as his back cracked against the stairs. His foot had slipped. He saw wood. Wood buried in more wood, between an arrowhead and goose down. The grain was brown, not splattered in red. Or inside him.

A twist of his guts and he scrambled over the worn steps. Just as he turned he saw a third figure lunging across the room, bow in hand. Bows killed. He moved faster. Wood burrowed under his fingernails, wriggling past the quick. He kept scrambling.

A leap and a landing. Level floor beneath his feet. The door to Ralus's room was still open. Below the room, below the window, a sign for the inn hung from an iron pole. A fleeting, loony thought—he took it.

 _"Help good sir!"_   Not a sound from a man, but a squealing whelp. His squealing voice, raw and terror-bound.

He raced past the bed that shuddered and sunk as a figure jerked up from the sheets. At the screech of a drawn sword he was smashing shoulder-first through the window, glass splintering and slivering. At a snarl from old, hair-crowned lips and a clashing tangle of limbs and blades, he was diving through the window.

His splinter-chinked hand grabbed at the narrow ledge and the force nearly ripped it from his wrist. He had misjudged where the signpost hung and his feet slid past metal. Twisting, snapping up his knees, he hooked them over the metal bar. The wall scraped off a layer of skin from his hand as he let go of the ledge and settled fully on the metal. Like as not he made bloody handprints on the wood. 

Fifteen feet between here and dirt. With no time for a prayer, he heaved himself off. The ground racked against his feet and he staggered, his half-formed roll ending facedown in the dirt. There was no time to lick wounds. _No dying tonight!_ _Please, don't die._ A lunge to his feet and he was running, crashing through bushes. Something _mewroawed_ in protest, but he had already gone past.

A hunted fox, he raced through the brush, and by the first tinge of dawn he straggled into the Imperial City like a broken beast. Legs lumbered on, supported barely by torn skin and purple toes.

"You look ill," said a half-asleep baritone.

"Like murder," he mumbled.

When the Waterfront was just going to bed, he was almost blown, his bleeding legs lurching him forward. If flesh could scream, it would have screeched against the sand packed into the cuts under his feet.

He teetered past the Garden of Dareloth, strong as dried kinder. He made no sound when a cold, smooth vice clamped around his ankle. To shriek when brushed by a spider, while hidden only by shadow three feet from a lord's axe-carrying bodyguard—that was a dead thief. He did not so much as yelp, even as his heart found a new home behind his tongue. Rabbit kicking and crow hopping found the terror not so ironhanded as before.

"Amusei you fucker!"

The Argonian sprawled on a half-clean mat. Damned lizard! No thought of boundaries. Too scaly-brained. His thoughts darted and stung, all to distract him from his shaking limbs.

"Did this one's mark take notice?"

"No."

His chest heaved now, legs becoming traitorous. Too much blood and not enough in him. The ground came up snugly to meet his keening knees. The darkness followed.

* * *

The darkness never left. Thieves craved shadows and nocturnal skies. But this darkness he detested, this unfathomable pit that swelled across the city. _I grow sick of this void._ No, terrified. The terror exhausted him, putting an ache into his joints and a ragged catch to his breath.

No more.

So much was gone, so little left. Only self-preserving thieves and death.

Death stalked the closest. 


	3. Foundling

He gagged on the smell, the scent congealing in his throat and sending him into sputters. _Garlic?_

"Never fails." Armand Christophe tossed the crushed garlic into the fireplace. He grinned, sharp humor still strong in the morning hours. "When jumping out of windows it's customary to roll."

"No."

Arieh was on his back, on a wooden table. Armand's table, used more for stitching bad thieves than eating supper. He had not woken here in years. Amusei draped across a chair, forearms mottled in rusty red. Coughing, Arieh reached into his shirt and pulled out the necklace. The doyan snapped it up, appraising faster than a harbor doxy.

"You've done well for yourself, besides almost dying."

"No. The…the Dark Brotherhood," he whispered, his blood-crusted lips cracking with the effort.

Armand and Amusei stiffened, the name a curse itself.

" _What?_ " No one wanted to hear that tone from the doyen. 

The nightmare returned. Thumps and slithery voices, skin-tight armor and black robes. "They were there too, for someone else. I heard noise below, went to see. They saw me. And I ran."

He could see the thoughts barreling through the thief's mind.

"The Brotherhood has killed in public with no care of watchers…" the doyen mused slowly.

For the first time since his mother died, he thought he might cry. The innwoman sprawled chin-to-chest, blood dripping all down her. 

"He was one of theirs, earned their wrath. He had a signet ring. The way he looked, even with an old robe…I think he was a noble."

Sometimes, Armand forgot he was a thief. A thug could move quickly when he meant business. A crack and snap of skin and bone—Arieh yelped when the doyen backhanded him across the jaw. He gagged and rolled, just as Armand dragged him off the table by his shirt collar.

" _Idiot whoreson!_ "

Truth regardless, Arieh sputtered. He had ignored a lesson. See, think, _dream_ the Dark Brotherhood is anywhere close means _run_. Long and far before they see you, for they do not forget. See something they want unseen and they will not stop; say something they want unsaid and they will not stop at just one throat. So said some thieves whose lives had found darker places. He had looked before he ran. 

"Doyen—" the lizard-man's rasp brought the Redguard up short. "That one is still owed for bringing the necklace."

The grip relaxed and he could stand on his own, as much as his shaking legs could hold. A few tenuous moments of trickling sweat and hopes, and Armand held out a leather purse.

"Here is your payment," he said, like a man who had seen too many wars and knew another one was coming. "Your last payment. The guild has banished you—leave, hide somewhere you wouldn't otherwise."

He felt almost catatonic, still dreaming. He regarded the thief. Though his swarthy face bore a scowl, Armand did not look ready to pound in his skull. 

"But we're kin."

Arieh saw the anger flame once more in the doyen's dark eyes.

"We are  _thieves_." A stifled sigh. No weakness in front of someone he might have cared for otherwise. "It's a miracle from Nocturnal you even made it back. But I cannot compromise the guild." The doyen seemed older than his thirty-three years then, as he stepped away and opened the door. "You were not supposed to see that meeting. They keep their contacts secret for a reason...and they will continue their hunt."

He straightened and took the purse. "I'm hurt."

The glass shards in his shoulder grinned and dug deeper, sawing through muscle and scraping against bone. Digging though an unseen pocket Armand produced a small bottle. A health potion. Arieh took it. It was no use until he got the glass and splinters out. More than one idiotic knight had gulped down a potion and been surprised when he died from septic.

"Where can I go?"

The doyen shrugged. "A thief in hiding? The sewers."

Disgusting.  _Things_  lurked in the sewers.

Arieh did not hate him. Thieves do not fight the Dark Brotherhood. They do not die for the mistakes of others, namely a fool who had to chase his curiosity. No asylum existed here. Amusei looked fixedly at a fly dinging in the corner. They already thought him dead. Thieves do not talk to corpses. 

* * *

" _Mother?"_

" _She's dead, I've said that before."_

_He sat under the rattling awning as the rain fanned out around him. Looking up through stringy bangs, he eyed the wide-shouldered man hardly bothered by the rain._

" _Not from what you say."_

 _The man cocked his head._ " _A pox."_

_No rain reached him but his face was wet. Under that, his cheeks flushed—anger, and the ale some red-mouthed woman had poured down his throat._

" _There was blood all down her."_

_The deep-voiced man stepped under the awning and pulled him up by the elbows._

" _Your mother was a whore who stole from her patrons. She died. Leave it at that."_

_He still had to look up to meet those dark eyes, even standing. This close, the man smelled of burnt wood._

" _Could a wizard have saved her?"_

" _Not for free." The man ran a hand over his ribs, making him yelp. "Hungry?" No, he wasn't. Just a gaping hole in his gut. The man shook his head. "You have to be. You were there for four days before Meredrei found you."_

_Four days? Mother had come home, walking with a wince, going to bed with a groan. She crawled into his bed, not hers._

_He had a cat once, until a dog chewed its leg off—it had crawled back to the house too._

_She woke with a cry. His eyes burned as she writhed and stilled, blood coming from everywhere. Of course he stayed—she was pretty Mother. Then someone yanked him away, the blood that pasted him to her flesh ripping apart, leaving him stinging and sobbing._

_He coughed. The sleeve he rubbed against his mouth tasted of blood._

" _Why are you here and not Meredrei?"_

_A dry chuckle. "We're kin, distantly, but blood is blood."_

_He thought he had seen the man before, once or twice. Or not._

The red-mouthed woman said he would need gold to stay here, like everyone else, but she did not sound mad. She had ruffled his hair with her long nails, smiled, and said he was lucky to be so pretty. Her smile was gone when she returned from the market though, traded for red cheeks and hitch in her voice Someone was here to see him, a man named Armand Christoph.

"W _hat do I do now?"_

_Sympathy did not easiy live in one who smashed the kneecaps of any who threatened the Gray Fox. Death for the guild, some said of him. Undying loyalty to the Gray Fox, all said of him. Another chuckle._

" _Do?" His eyes drifted to the house, grin quirking. "The only decent thing an orphaned son of a whore with an empty belly can do. Take from those who won't give it."_


	4. Hiding

He braced against the crate, belly low like a cat. The goblin snuffled with frustration. He knew the grime was caked on too thick for the creature to smell him. It could still find him. _Click click._  Gnarly claws on slimy stone. He kept the knife in hand, waiting, praying.

After the world lumbered on, so did the goblin. It turned, pulling a rusty sword with it. The screech against stone made his jaw throb.

He sprang, half-hurtling in an arc. Not smooth, just desperate. The dagger smashed down at the base of the goblin's neck.  _Crick crack_ —muffled by blood and flesh. His body collided with the creature's. They tumbled together.

The tiniest of snarls, and soon the running water made the only sound.

No idea where he was. Somewhere west of the prisons, probably. No vampires yet, but he had heard a hiss or two, somewhere far away down the echoing tunnels.

Blood trickled down his arm again. He had tried to remove the glass but knew more was in there. A trip to the university tottered across his mind, but it was a long trip. And they cast healing spells, not surgeries. Doctors could tell he was a thief. Guild thieves had their own doctors but he was no longer a thief. Other doctors would never see that distinction.

Picking himself up, he staggered back to his nest behind the crates. _Drip drip._ He hated that more than anything else—the constant drips, echoing for eternity within the underground systems. _Drip drip_ as his skin grew shivery and his glass-spackled shoulder grew hot to the touch.

How long?  _A week?_  It passed in a dark haze. The darkness too he hated. But torches attracted attention. He could handle little enough of that as it was. The goblin would need to be pushed into the water, but it would stink. What did goblin meat taste like, anyway?

Half an hour later he answered that question. Revolting.

He stiffened, hunched over a crate, an arm at his churning belly. Steps.

 _Scrape scrape._  Leather on stone. They had come.  _Bolt and flee, or stay and hide?_  Bolting would catch him an arrow, right in the neck. Staying would find a plunging blade. So joyous.

" _Arieh?_ "

It knew his name!

"Arieh?"

The voice! Low, girlish. A light glided through an archway. A grimy angel appeared behind it.

"Cat?" A whisper from a disused throat. Goblins made poor speaking partners.

The light tilted away, revealing a blinking face.

"Cat? What are you doing?"

"Getting you out of the dark." She stepped over the half-butchered carcass. A hand, so warm and street-calloused on his.

Cats and kittens always found their way through sewers. He had to walk with her arm under his, his good shoulder against hers.

"The guild won't allow it."

She snorted. "I don't give a damn about the guild. You saved me once, remember."

Fluttery, sweet memories. Sweeter than sewers at least. When she was fourteen she had tried to trick on a man who would not be tricked, and picked at his pockets when they were well guarded.

He had smashed the Breton's jaw with a rock and hauled him off her, keeping him down long enough for Cat to kick dirt in his face. Then they ran like the fools they were.

After that he had tried to teach her casing, to break into a house and take just enough that the owner would not scream for guards within the hour. But she was so miserable at it that she went back to picking pockets a week later.

He stopped. "I can't. They'll find me."

She snorted again. "Armand cares only for his beloved Gray Fox. If the Brotherhood wanted you dead, you'd be floating in the sewers now, if you made it that far." She patted his wrist.

So joyous. With the sewers threatening to never let him go, it was a good thought. _Logical too._

She led him out of the nearest grate. Immediately he saw the telltale buildings of the Elven Gardens District.

Like two shadows, one limping, they made their way through a garden. The wet grass felt good and cold under his too-warm feet. When they stopped, it was by a house. Cat crouched down and fumbled with a lock attached to a slanted piece of wood. The entrance to a cellar. Cursing the stubborn metal, she finally popped it open.

"When did you learn to pick locks so fast?" he mumbled.

Her mouth twisted. "I didn't. It's just loose."

Pulling open the board, she led him down the stairs. Inside it was warm.

It was an rich man’s cellar, with high ceilings and solid stone. To the side he spotted a fireplace. And a bed. An entire sitting area too. He felt like a creeping skeever.

"How did you…?"

She looked up at him with a smirk dripping with pride. The fireplace called her attention and she spoke over her shoulder.

"I found it about the same time Armand threw you out. Cozy, nay?"

He made his way over to one of the chairs and collapsed. Wood was more comfortable than rotten cloth or stone.

"How long has it been abandoned?"

"Oh, it's not." She giggled. "Norilar Carenen is a skooma addict, with pockets deep enough for years of dreams—courtesy of his wife tumbling off her horse. Stupid elf."

That mollified him. Enough skooma addicts had crossed his path that he knew a battle between Tamriel and Akavir could erupt in the addict's basement and never bother the dream-traveling wretch.

A fire took life in the hearth. Azura might have wrapped him in a protecting embrace. The world was so soft and delicate, so much better than those sewers, and the void he felt never too far behind him.

A hand clamped down on his shoulder, and the world shattered. His howl reverberated through the shards.

"Fuck woman!"

"I barely touched you. I need to get that glass out."

_Nine Divines…_

"You're not a doctor.”

"I'm all you got."

"Got any wine?"

"That too. You'll need it."

He did.

A doctor jolted from his sleep that night, gasping from a dream where a skinny girl was prying out shards of glass with a hairpin, removing more skin than glass.

His legs twined around the chair legs and his hand clutched at her dress. Even the copious amount of alcohol swaying through his veins could not block out the agonies as her pin picked at the glass.  _Hard going_ , she claimed. His skin had started to heal, meaning she ripped up a good amount of new flesh. Tears fought their way out as he tried to hold them back.

Agonies later and she was satisfied enough to slather on honey and find a wrapping. He was beginning to grow foggy from more of his blood being in the remains of his shirt than in him.

"I'll filch you clean clothes in the morning," she said, adjusting the makeshift bandages.

Finally he took out the health potion. With the glass gone, it would do some good. Swallowing it in a gulp, he felt his flesh tingle.

There was only one bed so they shared it, as they used to when they were younger. He held her to him, a dearest friend in his arms that would elbow him if he dreamed too loudly. The dying fire kept the cellar warm. Everything was warm.

* * *

Now it was cold. The coldest winter night, except it was far from winter. And he could not take it. He hid from merchants, not assassins. Two weeks of an Oblivion that even Dagon would not have thought of. Blood and filth and exile. The void-senders hardly needed to run him through—his life had died already.

A choice.

Cold and clear as a winter solstice.

' _Till death do thieves die._

He pushed himself forward, drawing his legs under him, a creeping cat. Dear Cat. The grass would squelch, so he moved lighter than fog, easing over the sopping clumps. Until he found stone—the adjoining street, across from the one the assassin now treaded. And his hand found his knife. Cold and clear as waiting death.

 


	5. An Ending

Cat left during the day to cull her living. He slept, ate, or adjusted his bandages. It was nice, this little home, like an inversed loft. A den.

She returned with food and they would dine, silent or sometimes not. He tended the fire during the day. Norilar Carenen never appeared, but the telltale groans in the wood proved he had not overdosed on skooma. That was good—Divines help them if the house was resold.

The sun burst through the door one day as Cat left. The  _sun_. How long had it been? Nostalgia hardened in his throat.

Clever Cat—the Dark Brotherhood would have killed him before he reached the Imperial City if they had wanted to.

_They wanted to scare me, to teach me never to doubt the ferocity of the Brotherhood. Like in the tales Meredrei would tell._

The sun burned his eyes when he stepped through. The world glittered. That day he stayed close to the manse, lazing in the nearby garden, letting the sun warm the scabs on his shoulder.

Cat kicked him in the ribs later that day.

"If I was a Dark Sister, I could have swooped down and stabbed you through the belly."

"I let you get close. You walk like a horse with four loose shoes."

He yawned and rolled away from her second kick. But she only smiled and hauled him to his feet.

Two days later and he had his dagger repaired by a blacksmith. Blacksmiths were rarely suspicious—it was difficult to smuggle out a claymore in one’s pocket.

Bells chimed low over the market district. The sky had reddened. He had taken longer than he had planned at the smith's. Cat would be long home.

Sheathing the fresh blade, he made his way back to the Elven Gardens District. He was still barefoot. New shoes could wait until tomorrow. He wondered if his old ones were still stashed outside the Roxey Inn. At least the ground was warm.

He wove his way past home-bound marks, not bothering to dip into an unwatched purse. Finally he came to the cellar doors.

Nerves scrabbled down his neck like little mudcrabs. The lock was fine, the doors still closed. But something prickled his throat. A thief's senses—Nocturnal's little gifts to keep a thief fed and alive. His legs gathered to send him bolting as far from the manse as possible. Yet sure as death, Cat had already entered. His stomach chewed on itself.  _Cat._  The only person he would put before himself. A thief's utter weakness—a true friend.

With a bone-rattling breath, he popped open the lock.

_Drip drip._

Bile scorched his throat. His shoulder ached.

 _Gods, the_ smell _…_

It was worse than the sewers. It bit at his tongue. Rusty metal. Too many years picking his way over slain drunkards not to place it. Blood.

_Drip drip._

No one was here. But a chair was overturned. Blood splattered the floor all around it. Drying blood, barely congealed.

_Drip drip._

He snapped around on one foot, to the door leading to the house. His stomach tightened and thrashed and he fought down vomit.

_Cat._

The sword that pinned her to the wall had her hanging by her breastbone. Blood, blood everywhere. Soaking into her green dress, dribbling from her slack mouth. She watched him, eyes like the fish at market.

Her hands.

The vomit pressed against his lips and he swallowed it down, but the tears kept coming.

Her hands had no fingers. They were scattered around the chair.

A scrabble in the shadows. He grabbed the dagger. A rat was the only intruder—hungry for meat.

Had she spoken? Screamed, no doubt. But he was not dead, and they were gone. Brave Cat.

Why was she impaled on a sword? Did they even know he lived here? A flush for a hare… questions questions and never an answer! A flush or not, he couldn't stay. Not with dead Cat.

So far below the ground…just like the sewers.

Sheathing the blade, he whispered a prayer to Nocturnal, and took only a few fresh bandages. He would left no trace of anyone but the dead girl.

Darkness flooded the city when he crept from the cellar doors. Now the ground chilled his feet.

But no matter how dark it was, he knew something followed him. Silent steps, but his thief's instincts howled again. He crept only a little further. Sliding behind a mossy garden wall, he hoped against all that the shadows preferred him to Sithis.

* * *

Creeping and sneaking—they counted more now than in an entire lifetime of thievery. His heart roared in his ear but he forced it steady. He had to hear the assassin, on the other side of the house.

The knife threatened to strain his tendons. He clutched it as if it had wings.

Armand would have stridden like a lynx, silent but bold. He would have smashed the fucker's legs in then worked on his skull. Others would have taken care of the mess. But even he shrinked back and hid from the Dark Brotherhood. He tossed them their desired flesh and hid in his shack. _Bastard._

A cry almost tore from his lips as he goaded himself on. Cold and clear as waiting death. _Pah!_  Fear grinded his vertebrae together. Mice leased his stomach.

No end, just darkness. So he had to keep going forward.

The first alley was black as sin, strewn with crates and scraps of wood. He picked his way over, slithering over the crates and debris. Crouching down in the shadow of a barrel, he watched as the murderer passed. Robes fluttered.

Creeping and sneaking, he moved to the street, feet behind the assassin. The hood meant he couldn't ram the dagger between the man's neck and skull—silent and less bloody. So that left screams or a bloodbath.  _Blood._  He dashed up the last two feet and took his vengeance. The blade bit clean and deep, slowing only as it sliced over the windpipe. Ear to ear. Across all veins. The blood gushed in a fountain, sputtering and spraying across the stones.

The assassin fell back—he hadn't expected that. He scrambling for balance as the bulk hit him, shaking and jerking at each spurt. The body pulled him down, forcing him to his knees, into a puddle of blood. Was the blood even there or was it wet stone? The head lolled back, onto his shoulder and the hood fell away.

Blood trickled down his neck and he clawed against the assassin. The Dark Brother meant to stab him as he died!

No, only the grave-quiet whistle of air through a windpipe, as blood flowed onto brown robes. The blood clogged his mind. Dully, gears splashed through the mess and furor.

_Brown?_

Not black.

A gag started in his throat. The uncovered face was fixed in a wide-eyed, stupid expression. Blood trailed from his gaping mouth.

Arieh clawed through the robes at the waist. Nothing. No dagger, no sword, no scabbard.

An elf returning home, late and unhurried.

A flutter from above, like bird wings. His neck snapped up.

A slender figure slid to the edge of the rooftop. She pushed back her coal-black hood. A death mask set in a half-smile.

That was when he realized. Moments ago she had been about to spring down like falcon, driving a blade into his throat. Never had he been truly hidden. Now she only stood there. A cold, mellifluous voice fluttered to his ears.

“Pretty boy, I thought to kill you. But you are almost family now."

**The End.**


End file.
